Apple will begin a dividend payment for shareholders of $2.65 per share starting in July.

Apple will also spend $10 billion to repurchase shares of its stock over the next three years.

Apple had cash reserves of $98 billion as of December

Cook said Apple had "a record opening weekend" Later press release said it was 3 million since launch day. AT&T has stepped in to announce that on Friday, March 16th, the carrier "set a new single-day record for its iPad sales and activations."

9 percent of US adults frequently get their news from Facebook and Twitter. Much more frequently from Facebook than Twitter.

Google and other search engines get 32 percent of the time, news sites account for 36 percent of the audience’s tips.

Upshot? "recommendations from friends are not a major factor yet in steering news consumption."

"For Twitter users, though, the news links come from a more even mix of family and friends and news organisations. Most of these users also feel that without Twitter, they would have missed this kind of news."

Discussion Stories

Draw Something has 10.8M daily users based AppData leaderboard, which is a tracking service through FB logins. OMGPOP says DAU is 16.5M. Words With Friends was formerly on top w 8.6M daily active users. Monthly usage has Zynga’s CityVille and Texas Holdem Poker on top. OMGPOP says 25M registered users.

TC sources say Zynga in talks to buy OMGPOP. OMGPOP has raised around $17 million to date, deal could be in the $150 to $250 million range. Talks preliminary. Word says Japanese buyers like GREE & DeNA have also expressed interest.

would be Zynga’s biggest publicly disclosed acquisition. usually acquiring small teams for a talent-price range of $5 to $20 million. In 2010 Zynga bought Words With Friends-maker Newtoy for $53.3 million in cash and stock & doubled daily active users in 4 months.

IE10 browser for Windows 8 will come in two flavors--one a streamlined, ""Metro-style"" program designed to resemble a smartphone or tablet app, the other a more standard desktop browser.

As Lance Whitney at CNET wrotes, this is both the good and the bad news

everyone who wants to use IE10 will have to choose which flavor they want--and could even end up switching from one to the other mid-task.

no menus, tabs, address bar, or other visual clues appear. Instead, the Web page takes up the full real estate of the browser. Right-clicking anywhere in the browser then reveals the address bar at the bottom and a space at the top where you can open a new page in a separate tab or close an existing page.

Clicking in the address bar displays a screen with Navigation tiles for frequently-used and pinned sites, so you can quickly open any site.

Hovering your mouse to the left or right of the screen displays arrow that can take you back or forward.

No plugins , so no flash or external password managers -- Accessing other options, such as printing a page or sharing it via e-mail, requires you to launch the separate Charms bar. ---- The two versions do share certain elements in common, such as a History list. --------This isn't a major surprise, but Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft is planning to finish up development on Windows 8 this summer, with the OS ready to ship on tablets and PCs in October. Bloomberg's sources of "people with knowledge of the schedule"

ON the Bioware forums, Bioware executive producer Casey Hudson, who says "insights and constructive feedback" from fans will help shape new content for the game going forward.

Also stressed that they were looking to make a polarizing ending

BioWare followed up with a post on the Mass Effect Facebook page today, saying that the developer is "actively and seriously taking all player feedback into consideration" and has "not made a decision regarding requests to change the ending."

Campaigners have acknolwegded they need to give Bioware some time to respond, though they continue to collect signatures.

"After reading through the list of promises about the ending of the game they made in their advertising campaign and PR interviews, it was clear that the product we got did not live up to any of those claims," user El_Spiko wrote on the Bioware Forums, according to gamepur.com.

A newly formed "Keep Mass Effect!" Facebook group popped up over the weekend "to show Bioware that these petitioners and lawsuit harbingers are, in fact, a minority to all those who love the Mass Effect series and how it ended."

"some of our most passionate fans needed more closure, more answers, and more time to say goodbye to their stories."

Hudson promised new content in the next year and said Bioware will "keep listening, because your insights and constructive feedback will help determine what that content should be. This is not the last you'll hear of Commander Shepard."

INCOMING

Email

"Hi Gang,
As you probably recall a few days ago I sent out a poll on Facebook to help me name my child. Well the internet has spoken and Lennox is here, we chose the Top voted middle name from the facebook poll Matthew so I present to you and to the TWIT Army Lennox Matthew Gomez 9.5lbs.

And ofcourse since he was named after Linux the attached picture was obligator, I give to you Ubuntu Lennox (attached)

I am active in the conlanging community (including hosting a podcast about it), and while it's not really the main focus of what I am interested in, I see a lot of invented scripts and a few neographies for English. So, with that in mind, my initial reaction to Dotsies is that it is absolutely terrible. The idea of condensing writing might seem like a good idea at first, but natural language, in both written and spoken forms, has evolved built-in redundancies (which vary from language to language and script to script) in order to combat noise.

For Dotsies, a flyspeck on my screen could easily change the reading of a character or -- in the font size of the example on the site, hide a good chunk of a word. Also, perceptual problems that commonly lead to dyslexia with natural writing systems would be exacerbated greatly when the only difference between five different characters is in the position of a single dot which itself comprises the entire character. The result is a script that is harder to read than Tengwar and not nearly as pretty. In short, Dotsies is a little too compressed to be at all useful, and honestly, I don't feel that screen real estate comes at that much of a premium.

That said, it's not even the most extreme example of this sort of information-density stuff I've seen. Dotsies is essentially just a reskinning of the Latin alphabet. To see how this idea of maximum information density applied in the creation of a completely new language, I highly suggest John Quijada's Ithkuil: http://www.ithkuil.net/ (fair warning: not that you would try it, but I really don't think Ithkuil is at all learnable by human beings).

Sincerely,
George Corley (GAC in the chatroom)"

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